{"id":347,"date":"2007-03-16T17:48:44","date_gmt":"2007-03-16T21:48:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/2007\/03\/16\/what-is-property\/"},"modified":"2007-03-18T17:15:35","modified_gmt":"2007-03-18T21:15:35","slug":"what-is-property","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/2007\/03\/16\/what-is-property\/","title":{"rendered":"What is Property?"},"content":{"rendered":"

These days, public discussion of economic policy and related laws (e.g. bankruptcy) tacitly assumes that property is something predetermined by laws of God or N<\/span>nature.* But an apartment which can be rented, cannot be sold as a condominium until and unless a master deed is filed on the building. And in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts “the condominium” did not exist at all until The Great and General Court [the real name of the Legislature] added it as a “form of ownership.” Property is a creation of Man<\/span> Person. [:)] Perhaps it’s no accident that Harvard’s Economics building is adjacent to the Law School.<\/p>\n

Knowing how to resolve conflicts over “property rights” means knowing what property is. French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon<\/a> posed his answer under the title, “What is Property?”<\/a> There is a course at Harvard in the Government Department by the same name. Or you can find some views of Harvard’s Legal Left in their Journal Unbound<\/a>.<\/p>\n

*When I first published this, I had the unqualified deitistic ‘N’. My bad. I do be after all, an empiricist, experimentalist, a bit of a nominalist, and just may be a crit<\/a> although as of this posting we Wikipedians got some ‘splaining to do. The homorphism with this<\/a> is not obvious. I met a bunch of Foucauldians**. Am I? [Am I truculent?] “I don’t know what that is, but if that’s good, I’m that!”<\/a><\/p>\n

** People who respect Michel Foucault<\/a>, but not consonants.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

These days, public discussion of economic policy and related laws (e.g. bankruptcy) tacitly assumes that property is something predetermined by laws of God or Nnature.* But an apartment which can be rented, cannot be sold as a condominium until and unless a master deed is filed on the building. And in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":168,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1363],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-i-just-might-be-a-crit"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/168"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=347"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}